The Bridge People: Daily Life in a Camp of the Homeless

This book is about the daily life of a group of homeless people who live in camps under some freeway bridges in downtown Los Angeles. It is what is called a narrative ethnography, that is, it consists primarily of what the author said to them and what they said to him. As a research project in the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, Underwood documented conversations with these homeless people for two and one half years. The ethnography unfolds in chronological order to allow the reader to learn about the Bridge People the way the author didoone day at a time. Underwood witnessed the sights, sounds, and smells of this particular form of extreme poverty and developed his research into a discussion of how these people view their existence and the world around them. The author also relates his experience with democratic and humanistic ideals of today.